Abstract: A new approach for the effective computation of geodesic re- gression curves in shape spaces is presented. Here, one asks for a geodesic curve on the shape manifold that minimizes a sum of dissimilarity mea- sures between given two- or three-dimensional input shapes and corre- sponding shapes along the regression curve. The proposed method is based on a variational time discretization of geodesics. Curves in shape space are represented as deformations of suitable reference shapes, which renders the computation of a discrete geodesic as a PDE constrained optimization for a family of deformations. The PDE constraint is de- duced from the discretization of the covariant derivative of the velocity in the tangential direction along a geodesic. Finite elements are used for the spatial discretization, and a hierarchical minimization strategy together with a Lagrangian multiplier type gradient descent scheme is implemented. The method is applied to the analysis of root growth in botany and the morphological changes of brain structures due to aging.

Abstract: This paper is devoted to the study of couplings of the Lebesgue measure and the Poisson point process. We prove existence and uniqueness of an optimal coupling whenever the asymptotic mean transportation cost is finite. Moreover, we give precise conditions for the latter which demonstrate a sharp threshold at d=2d=2. The cost will be defined in terms of an arbitrary increasing function of the distance. The coupling will be realized by means of a transport map (“allocation map”) which assigns to each Poisson point a set (“cell”) of Lebesgue measure 1. In the case of quadratic costs, all these cells will be convex polytopes.